--- Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Its development is certainly very much *aided by* the Wikimedia Foundation: they provide servers for the mailing lists, bug tracker, and wiki[s] (meta.wikimedia.org and, I think, mediawiki.org), and they drive much of its development, possibly even with financial rewards.
Not possibly. The foundation employs full time the lead developer of MediaWiki (and his primary duties are to do just that). The foundation does not, nor ever has, employed anybody to work on Wikipedia.
They may be the "senior user of the mark" in the sense that they were the first organisation to use the software, but they don't "use it in trade" because they are not directly responsible for its creation or distribution. It was developed (albeit primarily *for* them) by independent coders.
The foundation does not direct the creation of Wikipedia and is only one of many distributors of its content. What the foundation does do is act as the ISP for Wikipedia and her sister projects.
I know the two can be distinct, but since at no point has copyright in the software belonged even partially to the WMF, I see no reason why the trademark would ever have transferred to their ownership either.
Copyright and trademark are two very different things that are treated *very* differently in the law and are defended in *very* different ways. Mentioning them in the same sentence just confuses matters.
The name has only ever been attached to the software, on its own, as developed by a group of independent coders on behalf of the WMF and any other interested users (of which there are now many).
That is also true of Wikipedia (except for a tiny amount of extant text by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales that was transferred to the foundation when it was created).
[In fact, I think it was named as a direct result of generalising the software for use *outside* Wikipedia]
No. I suggested the name as a play on the foundations name; Wikimedia -> MediaWiki. Erik Moeller liked the idea and, lacking any opposition from the developers, made it so. I then bought the .org and .com domains, donated them to the foundation and officially transferred all my rights to the name to the foundation.
Now it may be a good idea to change the name of the software due to the fact that so many people confuse the names Wikimedia with MediaWiki, but from my perspective and understanding of the law the foundation clearly owns the trademark to the term MediaWiki. Registration is in progress.
-- mav
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